Title: Catspaw
Airdate: 10/27/1967
Plot Summary
Catspaw starts with Sulu, Scotty, and Jackson overdue on a planetary away mission, Jackson beams up dead and Sulu and Scotty are missing. Kirk, McCoy, and Spock beam down to a nightmare planet based on the various tropes of Halloween. They meet two aliens who pretend to be a Wizard and a witch. But what is their true purpose and how alien are they?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk figures out that the magic wand, or transmuter, is the source of their power. He smashes it and puts an end to all this. This works out a lot better than when he smashed Trelane’s mirror. Hey, if first you don’t succeed…
Sylvia has been a woman for all of 10 minutes and immediately starts getting pants-wetting hot for Kirk. This episode probably really started that whole “Kirk bangs the universe” trope. As I look back, he didn’t really do a lot of that in the first season as I would’ve thought. Here it’s really laid on thick (heh.. laid) and it really doesn’t work.
Logical
Spock shows, despite his protestations throughout the series, that he has a sense of humor. When Kirk asks for comment on the witch apparitions, he responds “Very bad poetry, Captain.” Much to Kirk’s annoyance.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones says “The man is dead” and immediately a spooky voice comes from the dead man’s mouth. Just so you know it’s spooooooky. Bones is also mesmerized by Sylvia’s necklace. Or possibly her cleavage, hard to say.
He spends the second half of the episode as a zombie.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu, along with Scotty, spends the episode being Korob’s and Sylvia’s meat puppets.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov takes over the science officer/first officer position for Spock. He also takes offense at DeSalle’s lack of confidence in him. He’s able to figure out how to punch holes in the aliens’ shield.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura does her best but can’t get through on the communicator. She mostly plays helper to Chekov and takes phone calls when necessary. Her working with the B-team and coming up with solutions was a missed opportunity.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty gets an away mission in Catspaw and it doesn’t go too well for him. I never understood the point of sending the chief engineer on any away mission, something that would happen in all the series, other than giving a character something else to do.
Canon Maker
Nothing really, other than I guess Halloween still kinda exists in the future? Bones knows Trick or Treat well enough.
Canon Breaker
In Arena, Kirk mentions that there is a small fortune in rare jewels and minerals. Here, he says they can manufacture them on the ship. This is more confusing language on money and the value of things we have now and what will be valueless in the future. Of course, maybe they are still very valuable and Kirk was just feeding Korob a bunch of BS to not be playing his game.
Man It Feels Bad To Be a Red Shirt
Jackson is a gold shirt but it did not save him. As an aside, DeSalle makes another appearance to take over the con when most of the crew is on the planet. Chekov is too green and Uhura has to keep communications communicating.
Technobabble
The aliens are able to interfere and hide from the ship’s sensors but not from Spock’s tricorder, something even Bones points out.
Kirk establishes that they can manufacture a ton of jewels on their ship.
I Know That Guy:
Theo Marcuse plays Korob, he played in a ton of series of the day as a guest star. Tragically he was killed in a car accident only weeks after this episode aired.
Antoinette Bower plays Sylvia. She had a lot of good work and retired from acting in 1992. She does appear in one of my overlooked movies, Club Paradise! She’s still around..
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Given Catspaw aired on October 27, four days before Halloween, I assume this was an attempt to tie into the holiday. Trek hasn’t really done that since, except for some passing references to Christmas here and there. It’s probably the failure of this episode that put them off.
I don’t really hate this episode but it really isn’t very compelling. “The aliens are not used to human sensations now that they have these bodies” trope is much better executed later on in the episode By Any Other Name. Sylvia and Korob’s motivations aren’t really well thought out. They seem to have the ability to find out everything about the humans, right down to their names, but decide to make everything they present to the humans based on fear.
Sylvia and Korob are explorers from another galaxy, fair enough. They don’t understand human senses but they go from exploring to evil pretty damn quick. Granted Korob at least comes to his senses and tries to help them.
Then you get the silly spooky imagery, like the three witches and black cat and all. It really doesn’t mesh with Trek. Spock saying that the cat is the most ruthless and terrifying of animals means clearly hasn’t seen Jaws. Or Snakes On A Plane.
It’s just too hard to take seriously but there’s one thing I really did like, though again it really fails in execution. It’s the sight of Sylvia and Korob in their true forms, little tiny creatures that immediately die. If they weren’t made of pipe cleaners, it might’ve worked. I really don’t want to ding them too much on that one as it was 1967 but they were able to do some pretty good creature effects in other episodes so I can’t really give it a pass either.
At least there was no humorous coda at the end, instead Kirk reminds everyone that it wasn’t a complete illusion, Jackson is dead. Maybe because he wore gold.
In the end, Catspaw is a paint-by-numbers episode that really doesn’t have too much going for it. It’s not terrible but it’s not very good. Slow pacing, muddled motivations and sloppy execution bring it down.
